This Alan Kay coinage summarizes the stance that Talented people are the high-order bit, so if you’re a hiring manager or a funder, you should think primarily about choosing the people you want to hire/fund—and don’t worry so much about the specifics of a given project.
It’s not clear that this is always the best strategy. Probably it varies by research area and various other factors. See Artir’s meta-review of the efficacy question.
Related: Talented researchers should be funded, not managed.
Kay, A. (2004, February 24). The Power Of The Context. Remarks upon being awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering.
Thus the “people not projects” principle was the other cornerstone of ARPA/PARC’s success. Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research. ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and ability. They cultivated people who “had to do, paid or not” and “whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and important”. Thus conventional oversight was not only not needed, but was not really possible. “Peer review” wasn’t easily done even with actual peers. The situation was “out of control”, yet extremely productive and not at all anarchic.